TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...
TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...
TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...
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an example of those studies where Benjamin silently overlooks the generic titles of<br />
tragedy and trauerspiel) argued in ―Die Aller Edelste Belustigung Kunst-und<br />
Tugendliebender Gemühter (Frankfurt 1666): ―[w]hoever will write tragedies must be<br />
excellently well-versed in chronicles and history books, both ancient and modern, he<br />
must know thoroughly the affairs of the world and the state, in which politics truly<br />
consist‖ (my emphasis 63). Trauerspiel grapples with the incidental details – the sighs<br />
and moans that really govern political action – upon which general histories of cause and<br />
effect rest.<br />
The signal truth, for Benjamin, that the things of history were the substance that<br />
informed the content of the trauerspiel lay in the fact that the trauerspiel had traditionally<br />
been a form reserved solely for princes to write. The Prince‘s position, as the only<br />
autonomous social agent that could effect political change, intrigued Benjamin, who had<br />
the temerity to seek in the conditions that underpin particular kinds of aesthetic<br />
production an explanation for why kings felt themselves to be autonomous writers of<br />
history. He did this by using examples of Royal forays into dramatic writing that he<br />
determined were precursors to ―trauerspiel-writing.‖ These included Julius Caesar‘s<br />
Oedipus, August‘s Achilles and Ajax, and Maecenas‘ Prometheus. It was, Benjamin<br />
argued, these princes‘ exposure to the mythical elements within the subject matter of the<br />
plays that they were concerned enough to rewrite that contributed to the making of their<br />
own biographies, their own fate, entirely different objects. That is, these writer-princes<br />
become knowable as figures in the bastard-genealogy of trauerspiel that Benjamin<br />
describes because of their enlightened aesthetic apprehension of the mythological falsities<br />
and the ―family of heroes‖ trope upon which kingship rested. Shakespeare‘s ―Julius<br />
31